Planet Sillicon

Spam in disguise

By blog on Jun. 14, 2010.

Don’t you hate when you buy something from a website, and then they forever send you spam-like emails. I hate that.

I bought some office equipment a while back as I had to have a pretty comprehensive set up for working from home. Now I’m getting spam emails telling me to buy digital dect cordless phones, and you know what, I never will! When I do have to buy a new phone again for my home, I’ll absolutely be getting a BT phone. On a side note, how cheap and creepy is this telecoms company’s website? Seriously, you can’t see what their range of telephones is, or how much you’ll have to pay for service, or… anything. You’d have to buck up and kiss your money goodbye if you were going with that place, because seriously, they look dodgy. Telephonix’s website is pretty damn crap, but at least you can see prices and detailed listings of their phone systems for businesses and what not.

There’s always the allure of going with the cheap, little companies, but there’s also the fear that they’ll go under in two months taking your money and services with them. I just don’t like getting spam at all, let alone spam from people who I willingly gave my email address to.

In spite of attempting to unsubscribe, I am still getting emails from Aion about their upcoming events and what not. They’re obviously one of those groups that thinks if they make it really hard for people to unsubscribe they’ll be able to get further hooks into people. Well, no, no you can’t have that. I don’t mind knowing what’s going on with LOTRO, but apart from that if I’ve stopped playing a game I don’t really want to receive more emails about it.

I suppose if it were emails coming from somewhere you bought from, where the item purchased wasn’t one that would last the next five years, and the store had something more than that one item, then I wouldn’t mind quite so much… No, no scrap that. I’d hate that. Don’t spam me. Let’s just leave it at that.

In keeping with my last post

By blog on Nov. 2, 2009.

Spam is everywhere, it’s pretty much unavoidable in one form or another, but this is a little baffling to me.

I’ve noticed a growing trend, maybe it’s due to getting closer to the holiday season and what not, but I’ve noticed more and more emails in my Inbox which are little more than spam… no wait, they are spam, but they are spam from companies that I am already affiliated with in some way, or have purchased from in the past, or have some sort of rewards card with or something like that. In some cases the promoted items or services aren’t from companies I’ve dealt with directly, but more a cross-promotion sort of thing.

As with BT, I don’t actually have a phone line with them anymore, but I did a few years ago, and I’m still getting spammy messages from them about upcoming deals on BT home phones and what not. Presumably if I liked the business, I would have stayed with the business, so if I don’t use their services anymore, shouldn’t I not have to put up with them? It’s not just them, either, telecoms companies are pretty bad with the whole spamming thing, probably because there’s so much competition in the field. I’m happy with my provider at the moment, so no, I don’t want your telephone system, I’ll stick with the one I’ve got.

It’s the same with internet connections, be they broadband, ADSL, or SDSL, the company always thinks that they can trick you into upgrading to a more expensive package. Its sort of insulting, I mean, I’m on a very high downloads per month package as it is, and I don’t go anywhere near my limit most months, so why would they send me emails on an almost weekly basis trying to get me to upgrade.

And yet, one of the most frustrating aspects about all of this is that to get off these mailing lists you have to follow link after link, and they are always tucked in the most out of the way parts of the emails or webpages that you go to, and you often find that they’ve sneakily altered the usual button set-ups, so you have to click on the left button, which is normally the ‘Cancel’ button. Anyway, that’s enough out of me for now, on this topic anyway.

Back to blogging means dealing with spam

By blog on Nov. 1, 2009.

Yep, and it’s a real shame, because it’s an off-putting task.

It’s insane how much of it can build up in just two weeks! I have to say, it makes me so damn frustrated with the idiots who spam my blog, even though I know they are only doing it because they are paid to, and okay, sure, things are tough for a lot of people at the moment, but come on, stop spamming everyone! To those who pay people to spam blogs like mine, you are so petty, your advertising methods are pathetic, and you aren’t going to sell your stinking prescription drugs and so on.

Gahhhh! I’ve not got a lot of energy in me at the moment, so to have to deal with all this spam is all the more irritating. I’m not just complaining over nothing, I’ve got over 200 spam comments to go through… that’s an insane amount of spam, and now they are getting more stupid. They are these really dumb jokes with the links to drugs or crap just stuck at the bottom. For instance, and this is the latest spam comment I’ve gotten rid of as spam – there’s about ten pages to go through, so I’m doing a little at a time – and this is a quote… “Fresh joke! What weighs 909 kg (2,000 pounds for all of you inefficient, non-metric “people”) and is bare to the bone? A skeleTON!!!”

Oh my goodness. Not only do I have to go and delete all this crap, I’m now subjected to some of the stupidest jokes I’ve ever heard. The only way these jokes could be anything less than crap is if they were told to you by a child still in single digits. They have a right to silly jokes, it’s like their territory, but to have spammers leaving this stuff there is just… just too much.

Usually I feel the need to be somewhat polite to these people, to be appreciative of the fact that they probably only do this job because they’ve not been able to get something better paying, but I’m sick and that gives me the right to be a grouchy… So… spammers, get the effing hell off of my blog!

Frustration with e-mail accounts

By blog on Sep. 10, 2009.

Dear me, dear, dear, me. E-mail accounts can be so damn annoying! I get all sorts of spam and phishing scams, but I can’t get an email I actually want?

I got a comment on my blog from someone who said they saw the site on Technorati, so I went over and decided to join up – looks like an awesome site, actually! – and ‘claim’ my blog. All was going well, save having to find a user name took a few tries, until it got to verification time. There was a little message at this point saying if you didn’t get the message, check this FAQ. Over I went, thinking smugly that I was just filling in time, that my email account wasn’t one of those frustrating ones which wouldn’t let this process occur, nooooo, of course not!

I have a Hotmail account that I use for all non-work stuff. The company I work for have a very strict policy about non-work related emails, it’s insane. Anyway, because I’ve had this Hotmail account for about eight, nearly nine, years, I don’t much fancy using anything else. Seems fair enough, right? Anyone notice how the free Hotmail accounts stopped giving you the option to ‘block’ some time ago? Well, I get a heck of a lot of spam and phishing scam emails as a result, and I can deal with that, at least they still go to the Junk box.

But this verification email is just gone, lost, never to be seen in my Inbox, and I’m really annoyed. I wanted to join this site, but now the chances of that seem rather diminished. All I can hope is that some nice person will read this, and post me the email address the verification link comes from, so I can add it in Hotmail as a contact, and then I’ll get the email! So that’s still really annoying, but nice to know people are reading my blog!